Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Progressive Christian
Does Christianity Solve the Problem of Evil? (spoiler alert: no, it doesn’t)

Does Christianity Solve the Problem of Evil? (spoiler alert: no, it doesn’t)

Last updated on: November 25, 2018 at 7:00 am by Vance Morgan

Does Christianity Solve the Problem of Evil? (spoiler alert: no, it doesn’t) 2018-11-23T16:12:59-04:00 Vance Morgan

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

In the six-plus years that I’ve been writing this blog, I’ve occasionally been asked what a “Freelance Christian” is. I call myself a freelance Christian because I don’t believe that any particular doctrinal formulation of the Christian faith is satisfactory. This is not because I’m still looking for the doctrinal package for Christianity that fits my own eclectic faith most closely; it’s because I don’t believe Christianity can be packaged in a doctrinal statement at all. Jesus did not come to establish a new set of beliefs. Jesus came to show us a new way of life, a new way of being in the world and with that which is greater than us.

This is why I am relatively comfortable with also describing myself as a “progressive” Christian, since the Christians I know who describe themselves that way tend not to be trying to clean up doctrinal statements. Instead, they seek to discover how the heart of the gospel is relevant to and can be lived out in our contemporary world. Choosing to understand Christianity as something that one lives rather than something that one believes is, of course, problematic for those whose Christianity is more about orthodoxy (what you believe) than about orthopraxy (what you do).

I was asked once a number of years ago when presenting a paper at an ecumenical institute the following question: “Doesn’t a Christian have to believe something with certainty?” My response—“I don’t know . . . do I?”—led to a conversation about how such a cavalier attitude could propel a Christian down the slippery slope to atheism. I recently came across an article that expresses the same concerns.

On The Gospel Coalition’s website, Alisa Childers worries that progressive Christians are in danger of sliding down just that slippery slope.

https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/3-beliefs-progressive-christians-atheists-share/

After providing a few anecdotal stories to illustrate her point, Childers identifies three specific ideas that progressive Christians and atheists share, suggesting that believing the same things in some contexts probably means that they share a whole bunch of other beliefs as well. If so, then perhaps there really isn’t any difference between progressive Christians and atheists at all.

The professor in me wants to spend a paragraph or two on just how flawed that logic is and to point out that “slippery slope” reasoning is one of the first informal logical fallacies freshmen study in Logic 101, but I’ll leave that aside in order consider one of the three ideas Childers mentions that progressive Christians and atheists share. She is concerned that such Christians and atheists do not believe that the problem of evil has been resolved (she’s also concerned that both parties think the Bible is unreliable and support moral beliefs that need not include God).

As a philosophy professor for the past twenty-five-plus years and a Christian since around the time I was conceived, I know something about the problem of evil. I have taught two honors courses on it in the past five years and will be organizing an entirely different course around this problem next fall. In her essay, Childers implies that as progressive Christians slide toward atheism, they are sliding away from Christianity’s solution to the problem of evil. Let me put my cards on the table: There is no version of Christianity that “solves” the problem of evil, as if this problem is a logical puzzle or a Rubik’s cube. What Christianity provides is far better than a “solution,” but recognizing this requires a willingness to rethink some doctrinal “givens” and to kick some sacred cows.

The problem of evil is simple to state. It involves four claims that are logically incompatible:

God is all-good (omnibenevolent)
God is all-knowing (omniscient)
God is all-powerful (omnipotent)
Evil exists

The first three claims are fundamental to traditional theistic belief, while the truth of the fourth claim is self-evident to anyone who is the least bit observant of our surrounding world. Logically, all four claims cannot be true simultaneously. Pick your favorite three to double down on, and the fourth has to be false. Which sucks, because any committed theist who is also an observant human being wants to affirm all four claims.

The problem of evil is no challenge for an atheist, of course, since an atheist denies the truth of all of the first three claims. The theist, Christian or otherwise, who tries to keep all four balls in the air simultaneously will soon find that it cannot be done. Which is not to say, of course, that heroic efforts have not been made to do so. From denying that evil is real to throwing in the towel and saying that the apparent problem is only a result of our limited human knowledge, implying that there is a divine logic in which all of these are compatible, there is no end of efforts to make our favored beliefs and reality hang together.

My own choice is to reject #3 and to say that, for good reasons, God is not omnipotent. Since I believe that God is a God of love, and since I also believe that love and power are incompatible on a deep level, I believe that God chooses to diminish divine power in the interest of lovingly providing human beings with the free choice to return that love (or not), as well as the opportunity to take responsibility for their choices. Once free choice is involved, all bets are off, since there is no guarantee that we will choose wisely, lovingly, or well. Hence evil. But a God who chooses to diminish divine power is not the traditional monotheistic God, as many traditional Christians have been happy to remind me over the years.

As we enter the Advent and Christmas seasons, I’m reminded that the foundational story of Christianity, the Incarnation, is a story of diminishment, of weakness, and of overwhelming love. God chooses to address the human condition by becoming human, by embedding divinity in humanity. This is not a “solution” of a “problem”—this is a mystery that transcends doctrinal parsing and logical analysis. Our world is filled with goodness and evil, love and abuse, vulnerability and power, and every other contradiction imaginable.

The heart of Christianity asks us to embrace being the vehicles of the divine in this world and to not be satisfied with or settle for a faith that assures us that it will all work out in the end. There is at least one important truth that Christians and atheists can agree on—human beings are the primary way that goodness gets into a world that is badly in need of light. Acting on that truth does not require any specific doctrinal framework. Rather, it requires the conviction that each person is uniquely qualified and situated to be an instrument of goodness.

Previous Post

November 23, 2018

Black Friday and the War on Christmas

Next Post

November 27, 2018 This is Why I am Not an Atheist

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category abortion Advent AI Angels Artificial intelligence atheism attention baptism Baptists beauty belief Benedictines Bible bicycling Big Bird books Bovina Camaldoli hermitage Canada Catholicism cats certainty change Christianity Christmas Collegeville Covid-19 creativity Development of Western Civilization dogs doubt Easter Enneagram Epiphany Episcopal ethics Eucharist evil extroverts Facebook faith family fear flowers forgiveness freedom friends God goodness grace happiness heaven hell history Holy Spirit Holy Week hope human nature humility humor idolatry incarnation introverts irreverence Islam Jeanne Jesus Joe Biden joy Judaism justice Kamala Harris knowledge Lent listen literature liturgy love Marsue Memorial Day miracles movies music mystery mythology NPR Old Testament optimism paradox peace Penguins philosophy piano podcast politics power prayer Protestantism Providence College Religion Rhode Island sabbatical sacrament science seeing silence Simone Weil Socrates soul sports St. John's College stories suffering tattoo teaching technology television theology thinking time tolerance transcendence travel trees trust truth Uncategorized Vermont wisdom wonder writing

Select a Month May 2026 April 2026 March 2026 February 2026 January 2026 December 2025 November 2025 October 2025 September 2025 August 2025 July 2025 June 2025 May 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 January 2025 December 2024 November 2024 October 2024 September 2024 August 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 January 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz